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Opinion:Nick Bostrom (Professor, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University), Existential Risks: Because of accelerating technological progress, humankind may be rapidly approaching a critical phase in its career.

Today, we are doing something we have never done on the Earth before. If natural factors haven’t been able to destroy the human race over hundreds of thousands of years, they will extinguish us in the approaching century.

The paradox lies in the fact that without technology our chances to avoid the global risks will equal zero, while having technologies gives us a bit greater chance to escape extinction, although it’s the technologies themselves that generally cause those risks. The major leading factor of why risks increase is the discrepancy between man’s maturity in terms of ethics and morals, and the growth of the power of the technologies created by him.

To minimize the risks of technological disaster, we need to do the following:

Raise the issues of existential risks,

Create a structure of cooperative international acts,

Regulate the pace of technological progress,

Design programs aimed at minimizing specific existential risks.

My Comment: Technologies that we produce are the direct outcome of our selfish attitude to the surrounding society and nature. Only our balance with nature could bring us to the wise use of technologies. But to achieve it, it is necessary to transform man’s nature first. And that can be done solely by the force that created us: “I created the evil inclination and the method for its correction.”[44279]